


like, a reasonable amount of Daves

by rarmaster



Series: (who's gonna) Save the World [6]
Category: Homestuck, Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: (majora's mask link for the record!), Gen, Save the World crossover, rated T because Dave swears a lot slkfsfsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 13:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14473425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: Part of theSave the World Crossover. There are rips in the time-space continuum, and these kids gotta try and survive (and, maybe put a stop to it).Dave finds himself in a position where he apparently has to save two randos he just met from a nigh-unkillable monster. Some reasonable time shenanigans ensue, the kind that involves no deaths and a reasonable amount of Daves.(Or: In which Dave joinsTeam D)





	like, a reasonable amount of Daves

**Author's Note:**

> this installment breaks my pre-established title motif but fuck you this was a really good line and I'm too tired to come up w/ a better title

As far as Dave could tell, things were pretty piss fucking poor. Yanked out of his bed and tossed who knows where—just that it wasn’t Earth, or, the new Earth they’d made for themselves after winning the game—was not how he’d wanted to wake up this morning, but here he was. Wandering some godforsaken fucking city and worse than that, now he had to deal with _monsters._

He was lucky he hadn’t gotten comfortable enough to unequip his sword from his strife specibus, so he at least had that with him. (The Deringer, because the fake welsh sword could suck his dick.) And his god tier pajamas, apparently, even though he definitely hadn’t worn them to bed but okay whatever they were magic so he wasn’t going to question it. He was too busy being ass-deep in monsters, anyway. _Monsters._ Like what the literal fuck? Where _was_ he!?

“If this is Jade’s fault, I’ll kill her,” he grumbled to himself, slicing through the nearest monster. The monsters were kind of like the imps from his session, being pitch-black and all, except they weren’t wearing ridiculous clown costumes and didn’t have godlike powers thanks to Jade’s dog. Also they were _gooey._ Slicing through them felt more like slicing through jello with a knife than it did slicing through an enemy with a sword.

“Actually Jade’s too nice for that,” he amended to himself. “Probably John’s fault. He wouldn’t even need to put Jade up to it, he’s got those weird retcon powers.” That or Jade had turned evil again but that was incredibly unlikely and very much a train of thought he didn’t want to follow, so he just set his teeth and continued slicing through monsters like they were weird jello and continued forward.

“Forward” was relative in a place that he had no familiarity with, and no idea on what kind of destination he was working towards, but.

There was a kind of pulling, in his bones. A sense of inevitability he was used to with all the Time bullshit, blah blah he was predestined to be somewhere in the future so he had to get there first to make the timeloop stable. The sensation honestly made him want to dig in his heels or run the other direction, but Dave knew better than that. You couldn’t argue with the stupid fucking stable timeloops.

And it was the only lead he had to go on, anyway.

Eventually the monsters started to thin out, which was nice. Soon he was seeing more inky splotches of monster goo on the ground instead of actual monsters, though some of those goo puddles looked like they _wanted_ to become monsters again. Gross? Dave hurried past them and tried not to think about it. The pull in his bones was getting more intense, a drumroll leading up to some kind of finality. He was getting close, now.

The drumroll stopped when he turned a corner and found himself face-to-face with a monster the size of a house. Like, a reasonable-sized house, anyway, not one with a million stories added on top of it. John’s-house-sized? Also it was less face-to-face and more face-to-ass, because that thing was _not_ looking his direction at all.

The monster was more preoccupied with a pair of people on the other side of it. Dave could see flashes of them through the monster’s legs. A young boy in green. A woman with blue hair.

“Guess I better get over there and go _hey! I’m a guy that exists!_ before one of them catches me in their crossfire like I’m some, uh… sports metaphor” He scowled at the thought, wished not for the first time in the past like hour that Rose was here with him so she could pick up his sports-metaphor-related slack. Also something related to one of John or Jake’s action movies may have been a better metaphor—“Actually it doesn’t matter I’m god tier aren’t I so long as it was accidental it’d be no big deal huh. Okay stop talking to yourself Dave let’s do this bullshit.”

He was no action hero nor really any regular kind of hero, so Dave kind of just sidled awkwardly around the monster’s legs until he was on the other side of them. He let out a low whistle as he watched the green kid run halfway up the monster’s legs and get in some really impressive hits with the sword he had. Where’d the kid learn moves like that? Hopefully not from having a sorry excuse for an older brother like Dave.

The woman, meanwhile, was making the air all tingly with some kind of magic like he knew Rose was fond of. That too brought a sense of awe to Dave’s gut, because holy shit, that was some strong stuff indeed.

“Oh hey!” said the kid, when he landed and noticed Dave. “You mind helping us, stranger? If you’ve got a sword you’ve gotta be good with it.”

“Uh, sure,” Dave said. He was good with a sword. And good at killing monsters. He ran at the monster’s other leg and started taking some swipes at it, while the kid went back to the one they were hacking at. The woman aimed magic spells up at the ugly thing’s face.

Now that he was a little closer, Dave could take better stock of the situation. It was hard to tell how close the monster was to being out of HP or whatever it was when the monsters weren’t creatures of a game. The monster certainly didn’t look that worse for wear that was for sure. Dave’s sword strikes left no bleeding wounds, just goo. Goo that seemed to snap apart from itself and reshape pretty fast.

That wasn’t comforting.

The kid, Dave noticed, was breathing pretty hard, sweat standing out on his forehead like he’d been going at this for a while and was starting to reach his limit. That didn’t stop him from running at the monster again, but it sure didn’t fill Dave with confidence of any sort. The woman looked—not strained, not tired, but… her eyes were kind of unfocused like how Rose’s used to get when she was hungover.

“You guys, uh, doing okay?” Dave asked, not sure what else to ask in order to gauge the potential futility of this battle.

“Eh,” the kid said. “It’s um, been a long one.”

“Don’t be silly, Link, we’re fine!” the woman called. There was a chilling sort of confidence in her tone. One that put Dave more on edge than if she’d said she wasn’t doing hot or some shit. “This is nothing!”

The kid—Link—looked to Dave, his expression very much _are you believing this shit because I’m not_. Dave laughed nervously.

“Well,” he said. The pull of inevitability echoed in his bones. Already his mind spun with a few potential ways this monster could be taken down if he set up a stable time loop or twenty. He sighed, a heaviness on his shoulders. “If I said I had some kind of crazy special move or some shit that would potentially ruin this thing like a pumpkin getting dropped from the roof of a billion story house would that be, uh, like a thing you’d want me to do.”

Link didn’t look like he understood entirely, but: “Please,” he said.

Dave groaned a tiny bit. “Man, can’t say I’m looking forward to it…”

“Then don’t worry about it!” the woman told him, her mouth set in a thin smile. Her eyes burned with a determination that no human should ever hold—a look he was used to seeing on Rose, but one no less unsettling. “We’ll be fine, really.”

“Aqua I know you have magic for days, but—” Seeing that he wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with her, Link turned to plead with Dave. “We’ve been fighting this thing for a really long time and nothing’s working.”

“Yeah no shit,” Dave said. He cut through the leg of the thing again just to be sure. A cut like that should have severed the bottom half of the leg completely—he had some _serious_ levels under his belt—but instead the leg just kind of snapped back together. What Dave could _really_ use was John and a giant hammer to smash this thing like it was a block of jello. But John wasn’t here. So Dave would have to work with what tools he did have.

Even though he really hated those tools.

“Maybe with just… some extra help…” Dave tried to rationalize to himself. He could certainly fight more fancier than he had been up ‘til now. “Like three people combined have gotta be able to do some serious damage right so if I just—” But then he spotted a flash of red in the sky above. A shape similar to his own slashing down through the monster from above, sliding down it like a pirate in one of John’s movies, using their dagger cut through a sail and slow their descent. “Oh come _ON!_ ” he shouted.

“Sorry!” his future-self called back.

“FUCK YOU FUTURE DAVE!” he shouted, louder, for good measure. Not that it mattered. Now that his future-self was here, everything else couldn’t be resisted. The choice had been made for him, unless he wanted to create a doomed timeline or three.

“Stable timeloops, my man,” Future Dave said by way of apology, as he dropped onto the ground in front of Present Dave. Present Dave sighed.

Link and Aqua probably were gaping up a storm behind him, but Dave didn’t have time for that.

“Fine alright what’s the plan your shitty swipe through the guy didn’t work,” Present Dave asked.

“Yeah well that’s what I saw myself do so I had to do it again.”

“God dammit.”

“Tell me about it these powers are the shittiest goddamn powers of the bunch, all this predestined bullshit and doing things not because you think they’re cool but just because you saw yourself doing them like where’s the fun in that. Anyway.” Future Dave coughed. “Plan is we’re gonna slice up this asshole like the jello-block he is, a million little cuts from a million Daves.”

“Oh fuck no I ain’t doing this a million times,” Present Dave said, firmly digging in his heels. He could die in a doomed timeline actually. That was fine.

“Sorry that was a big number picked at random to drive the metaphor home,” Future Dave said. “Maybe we should put a rest to all the metaphors, they’re really confusing.”

“Yeah well quitting them cold turkey can be a problem for Future Future Dave.”

“Agreed.”

There was a lapse of silence, then Future Dave seemed to remember he had a battle plan he was laying out.

“Anyway right we’re gonna hit him with a reasonable amount of Daves and cut him into pieces like jello, that metaphor’s still sound,” Future Dave explained. “Link, help with the cutting if you can, and Aqua I know by now that you have some spell up your sleeve that will blow this guy to pieces and through the power of sick teamwork we’ll knock this guy good and dead.”

“Uh, sure,” Link said, ready to agree but still looking confused about the two Daves thing.

Aqua also looked confused, but she nodded.

“Alright.” Future Dave turned around and readied his sword. “On three—Present Dave you too—we’re doing this.”

Present Dave couldn’t resist the follow up. “We’re making this happen?”

It wasn’t the same saying it aloud versus typing it up with the shitty spelling and unnecessary capitalization, but Future Dave still smiled.

“Hell yeah we are, we’re making it happen so hard. Ready? One. Two. Three!”

They all threw themselves at the monster, Link and Dave and Future Dave and like a dozen other Daves, swords flying to cut it into as many pieces as possible as fast as possible, so that its separated pieces would be too small to snap back together. Something like an explosion going off from inside of it—Aqua’s doing?—probably helped matters, at least in making all the pieces fly too far from each other.

And then the Daves were gone and monster guts were raining down on them, blobs of goo that seemed to be trying to take the shape of smaller monsters now. A barrage of lightning bolts coming down from Aqua’s sky-raised blade disintegrated them all before they could start.

“That was… _really_ cool!” Link said, breathless as he ran up to Dave. Dave kind of laughed and gave the kid what he hoped was like, a cool smile? Being looked up at was not a thing he was used to.

“How did you…?” Aqua asked, eyes narrowing with skepticism.

“Time travel,” Dave answered, with a weary sigh. “Knight of Time, all that jazz, though I guess that probably means literally nothing to you. Time to uh, go make sure all of that actually happens. How many Daves did you count?”

Aqua and Link exchanged looks like they hadn’t realized they were supposed to be counting.

“It was 20 even!” called Dave’s voice, and Dave turned to see another future-self giving him a half-hearted salute before vanishing.

“Thanks!” he called back, even though the Dave was gone. Then again the Dave was him so like, he knew he said thank you. That’s all that mattered, wasn’t it. Yeah. Anyway. Time for the bit he never looked forward to.

He looked to his new companions and finger-gunned. “Brb.”

He ached for Terezi’s coin to decide whether he’d do the attacking or the explaining first, but he didn’t have that so he just went with his gut instead. Explaining, to get it out of the way. Swinging a sword at some guy was a lot less work. So he jumped through time and did that shitty slicing-down-through-the-monster maneuver, and explained things to himself-of-two-minutes-ago, and then made a move on the being the twenty different Daves who contributed to the monster-slicing.

There wasn’t much to write home about. It was just a bunch of obnoxious time-jumps and slicing through a monster a couple hundred times once all the swings added up. Finally—after dropping by to tell himself that he needed to do 20 jumps—he landed back in the Present and just straight-up collapsed onto his back because that had been a little bit exhausting and his new companions could suck it if they wanted to act like a real functional human being. He hadn’t been one of those since before Sburb. Actually even before Sburb he hadn’t been one of those.

“Oh!” Link said, surprised. He knelt down next to Dave. “That was quick! Time shenanigans, I presume?”

“Yeah, but what do you know about those?”

“More than you might think.”

Dave squinted up at the guy, but decided he didn’t care enough about it. He was already gonna have to hash out the basics of his own time powers, he could just _feel_ that conversation coming in his gut. And he only had enough in him for one headache-inducing conversation per day.

Aqua came to join them, and had the decency of kneeling down on the other side of Dave, but not close enough to crowd him, instead of standing like some kind of asshole.

“So you have… time travel powers?” she asked, a light of excitement in her voice that meant her next question would be: “How far can you travel into the past? What can you change?” Yep, right on schedule.

Dave ran his hands over his face, dislodging his glasses for a moment. “Yeah here we go, everyone thinks the powers are about changing the past to make a better future or some shit. But that’s lesson one about time powers. Stable. Timeloops. Only.” He sat up then, readjusting his glasses and looking at Aqua in full force to make sure she got it. “Meaning that unless I see my future-self do some shit, I’m not clear to do the shit. Going back in time and messing with the past only creates a bunch of doomed timelines and dead Daves.”

“Oh.” Aqua looked a little crestfallen, but she could suck it. Even if his powers weren’t restricted like this, it wasn’t like he was the kind of guy to help out someone he’d just met change their shitty past. Besides, she looked pretty well-adjusted. How shitty could her past even _be_?

“Well, thanks for helping us out like that,” Link said. “We really appreciate it! I’m Link, by the way.”

“Aqua.”

“Dave.” He flopped back onto his back, taking in the sky. It was kind of orange, like the worst days back in Texas, strifing on the roof at sunset. He squeezed his eyes shut, grateful that no one could tell with his glasses. “Either of you got an idea on where we are? What’s going on? What these monsters even _are_?”

“Don’t really know about the monsters, or where this is,” Link answered, “but as far as what’s going on, well… How did you get here? You remember?”

“Woke up here.”

“You got sucked through a portal, is what really happened,” Link said. “There’s been all kinds of ‘em popping up lately.”

“We’ve been working our way through them,” Aqua added. “We’re not sure where they go, nor where we’ll end up in the end, but moving is better than staying put.”

“Can we take a break, though?” Dave asked. “I’m _exhausted_. The worst bit about time powers means what looks like it took two seconds to you takes like two _minutes_ for me, at least.” He should have a better grasp on how long exactly it took him to do things, since Time was his whole jam and shit, but honestly Dave just didn’t care enough.

“Oh yeah definitely,” Link agreed. “No arguments, Aqua.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she protested, an exchange which sounded like they’d had this conversation before, or some form of it, many times. “Even if I’m alright, I wouldn’t want to push you two.”

“You shouldn’t push yourself, either,” Link said. They’d _definitely_ had this argument before.

Dave realized then that somewhere they’d silently agreed he’d be traveling with them from now on. Alright, he guessed. It beat being alone. And he didn’t have many other options, did he? He was the Knight of Time, not the Knight of Space. And he’d couldn’t just text Jade to come get him—he’d already tried, and quickly discovered he had neither cell service nor wifi out here, so yeah. Traveling with some kid with a sword and some lady with powerful magic but apparently awful self-care skills was apparently where he was at, now.

Could be worse.


End file.
